Making money in commercial games Part 1: The reseller.
There are loads of myths around getting paid to play games. In some cases the myths are reality, and in other cases, well, they are horse droppings. I can say that there is a professional gamers market out there and some gamers do get sponsored to play. I think the late 90's started to show a trend towards watching professional gamers for entertainment. I got approached at one point to get paid to play Half-Life and be sponsored by some generic advertising company that was reselling my body parts to various other companies (aka Nike shoes, Reebok hats, things like that). I turned it down, since I was happy programming at the time and playing for fun, but maybe I didn't make the right choice? (for those that played Half-Life, I ran some servers for the [DRS] clan and I was a founding member for the [COOP] clan, screen name [COOP]DigiTec. My only true competition whole I played was Cue, [AM]Paul, and Kinetix, so if you are out there, give some shouts).
That is the commercial endorsement side of making money on commercial games. Lately there has been a trend towards the reseller though. Machines are cheap, internet is cheap, and monthly subscription fees are cheap as well. The reseller plays a game and then resells either accounts or unique items to the highest bidder on auction sites like Ebay. The Myth for this portion is that a lady actually left a full-time SDE position at Microsoft because she was making more money selling online virtual goods. I never will know if this is true, but I'm sure some of the MS guys have heard about it and maybe can validate whether or not this is true.
Selling virtual goods is viable then? Well, you can sell certain Diablo 2 rare drops for between 5-15 bucks. If you could find 1 a day, that is 150-450 bucks a month. That is only a single account and single machine. Start adding more $300 machines and you can start compounding the money rolling in. Internet services are cheap at $40 for cable broadband. Maybe this myth is true?
How does the reseller truely work? Well, either they find a game where unique items are worth a great deal of money and manually replicate those items through game play. Other games don't have extremely valuable items, so these players tend to automate tasks. You see the reseller has an in-depth knowledge of how the games work in terms of playability, where to find things of value, and even how to play the psychological game with people outside of the game to pawn off their wares for real life cash. These people put together a great deal of skills (yes arguable, but I still stand by it) to make money doing what they enjoy.
Currently the most successful resellers run automation software. Does that mean only technically savvy users or programmers can take advantage of these money making opportunities? Heck no. Most of the time technically savvy people don't even realize the potential, since the game is a past-time and not a source of profit. Sometimes they do realize the potential though, and things start to get ugly really fast. I'm going to cover a new evolution in the selling of virtual online goods in a follow-up and you'll start to see how much money these people must be making. (here's a hint, they have enough money now to create small companies and hire employees to actually managed the process ;-)